Ern Malley

Brilliant hoax poet

Jacket 17 is perhaps my favorite among all the forty glittering habiliments; exploring a dozen aspects of fakery and forgery, which one distinguished contributor identifies as the very heart of poetry. The jewel in the crown of Jacket 17 is the Ern Malley hoax of 1943: it inspired Ashbery as a young man, and opened the world’s eyelids to the dark energy from the bottom of the planet. Here it is, in relentless detail:Faking Literature: Patrick Herron: Ken Ruthven’s Faking Literature (and Ern Malley) Faking Literature: The Bibliography Ken Ruthven: — 25 pages of rare and hard-to-find source materials (including Ern Malley) Girls on the Run: Michael Leddy: Lives and Art: John Ashbery and Henry Darger (and Ern Malley) John Ashbery and John Kinsella and John Tranter (and Ern Malley) — ‘The Ern Malley poems’

Max Harris — Introduction [his original Introduction to the Ern Malley poems in Angry Penguins magazine, Autumn 1944] Ern Malley — The Complete Poems Ern Malley’s recently discovered Last Will and Testament Max Harris — Two pieces [immediately following the Ern Malley poems in Angry Penguins magazine, Autumn 1944] David Lehman — A Note on Harold Stewart [written after a visit with ‘Uncle Harold’ Stewart in Kyoto in 1990] John Thompson — The Ern Malley Story: audio — the 1-hour radio documentary in RealAudio, with the voices of all those involved in the hoax, made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1959. You can download the free basic model of the RealAudio plug-in for your browser here: http://www.real.com/ John Thompson — The Ern Malley Story: transcript — the full transcript of the radio documentary above; first published as an Appendix to Clement Semmler, For the Uncanny Man — Essays, Mainly Literary, 1963. Press Clippings from 1944FACT, 18 (?) June 1944: Ern Malley, the great poet, or the greatest hoax?FACT, 25 June 1944: Ern Malley, Poet of Debunk: full story from the two authors (with McAuley and Stewart photos)The Herald, 4 July 1944: ‘Nearly Bad Enough to be Genuine’ ...with McAuley photo and reader's letter.The Herald, 4 July 1944 — The Case of The Angry Penguins Ern Malley’s Doctor of Oxometry degree (FACT magazine, 1944)FACT’S London News Bureau, 9 July 1944 — English comment on Ern MalleySydney Morning Herald, 15 July 1944 — FEATHERS FLY!The Bulletin ‘Red Page’, 19 July 1944 — ‘Hoaxed Penguins’Unknown print source, 1944 — [a summary of the hoax]The (Melbourne) Age, 4 November 1944 (a notice of The Darkening Ecliptic)Voices magazine (Vermont, USA): Contents page, Number 118, Summer 1944 Max Harris: ‘Commentary on Australian Poetry’, from Voices magazine, Number 118, Summer 1944 Michael Ackland — Damaged Men — ‘...one day it will be irrefutably proved that James McAuley and Harold Stewart were really figments of the imagination of the real-life Ern Malley and in fact never existed! ’ — a 50-page excerpt from the book about the brilliant hoaxers who created Ern Malley.

"The Apotheosis of Ern Malley," by Gary Shead, circa 2001. Reproduced with the kind permission of the artist. The two figures in army uniform represent Harold Stewart and James McAuley.

Michael Heyward — ‘Indecent, Immoral, Obscene’: a 60-page excerpt, dealing with the obscenity trial and the public crucifixion of Max Harris, from Michael Heyward’s book The Ern Malley Affair.

“I have found that people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes. My exper as police officer might under certn circs., tinge my apprecn of literature.” The court typist’s transcript, in full, of the trial of Max Harris, an editor of Angry Penguins magazine, for the offence of publishing indecent advertisements. The trial was held in the Adelaide Police Court in September 1944. Mr Harris was convicted of the offence and fined. The original has 74 typed pages. Edited by John Tranter in 2005, with emendations and notes.

Max Harris, Detective Vogelsang, and others — ‘Indecent Advertisements’: photographic copies of five pages from the transcript of the trial of Max Harris charged with the offence of ‘Indecent Advertisements’ in the Adelaide Police Court, 5 September 1944, courtesy Philip Mead.

McKenzie Wark — ‘Black Swan of Trespass’ — a postmodern response. See also John Miles — Lost Angry Penguins in Jacket 12: with the deaths of D.B. Kerr and P.G. Pfeiffer as young Royal Australian Air Force airmen during World War II, Australia lost two original and promising poets. They were also among the founders of the Angry Penguin movement. See also Jacket 29 — David Brooks: “Petit Testament”: A Reading [on the Ern Malley hoax]

John Tranter founded this magazine in 1997. He has published more than twenty collections of verse, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies. His book «Urban Myths:210 Poems: New and Selected» (2006) won a number of major Australian prizes, and his latest book, «Starlight: 150 Poems», won the Melbourne «Age» Book of the Year poetry award and the Queensland Premier's Award for Poetry, both in 2011. As well as writing and editing poetry he has been a teacher, a publisher's editor, and a radio producer.

Photo: John Tranter, photo Anders Hallengren, Sydney, 2009

In October 1997 he founded the free Internet magazine «Jacket», and in 2010, after forty published issues, he granted «Jacket» to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where it grows and flourishes as «Jacket2». In his spare time he founded the Australian Poetry Library at http://poetrylibrary.edu.au/ which publishes over 40,000 Australian poems online. He is a Doctor of Creative Arts and is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney School of Letters, Arts and Media, and an honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is married with two children and currently lives in Sydney. Please feel free to browse by his Journal at johntranter.net and his vast homepage at johntranter.com.

From John Tranter: Hi. I have been asked to write a Commentary for «Jacket2» for a few months, starting in October 2012. Generally I sit in a rocker on the back porch, sipping from a jug of hooch and making wisecracks through the screen door; I guess the editors want to make me more useful. Well, hang around. I plan to look at some history -- how did I get here? -- and look at some of my favorite items in the forty issues of «Jacket» which I edited, including British, Canadian, European, Spanish-American and Australian poetry and creative and critical writing, and the ferment of the USA, and from time to time I will talk about other things that interest me including photography, printing, typography and the management of the philosophical tendencies of the common capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris).

Photo: Two capybaras anxiously discussing Wittgenstein's apparent rejection of some of the key propositions of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).

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Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Banner photo at the top of this page: It varies, as the mood takes me... Sometimes it's Cloud and Palm Tree, Sydney, photo by John Tranter and a touch of Photoshop. Uh, no... it keeps changing... Oh well... whatever...